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Dessert

Cherry Pickles

A pickled cherry preserve made with vinegar, salt, spices, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Cherry Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the cherries in cold water and salt for 18 hours.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. Combine vinegar, allspice, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar in a pot and heat until hot.

Pickle

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the cherries.

  2. Repeat this process for three consecutive days.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Main fruit that softens and absorbs the pickling liquid's flavor over time.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the fruit.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cloves
Adds warm aroma that infuses into the fruit through the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Repeating the hot pour for three days. Heating the vinegar and sugar dissolves the sugar and carries the spice flavors into the fruit. Repeating the hot pour over several days lets the flavor penetrate gradually, so skipping days leaves the cherries under-flavored.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, allspice, cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Clovethe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Cardamomfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, allspice, cinnamon, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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